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Assessing China’s Plutonium Separation and Recycling Programs
Hui Zhang
Project on Managing the Atom
Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University
79 John F. Kennedy Street, Cambridge, MA 02138
Abstract
China pursues actively its closed fuel-cycle policy. In 2010, it began testing a pilot civilian
reprocessing plant (50 tHM/year). In 2015, China began construction of the demonstration reprocessing
plant (200 tHM/year). China has also been negotiating with France over the purchase of a commercial
reprocessing plant with a capacity of 800 tHM/year. China’s Experimental Fast Reactor (20 MWe)
started operation in 2010. Construction of the CFR-600 demonstration fast reactor began in 2017. This
work will assess those plutonium separation and recycling programs. Further, it will estimate their
cumulative plutonium production and discuss the potential uses of separated plutonium in China’s fast
reactors over next two decades.
Since 1983, China has officially planned to reprocess spent fuel from nuclear power plants to
recover and recycle the plutonium and uranium. Since 2004, when China shifted its nuclear power
development policy from “moderate development” to “active development”, it has implemented a three-
stage plutonium-recycling strategy: pilot, demonstration, and commercial facilities. Although the pilot
facilities did not perform well, in 2015 China advanced to the second stage, which includes building a
demonstration reprocessing plant, a mixed-oxide fuel facility, and two demonstration liquid-sodium-
cooled fast-neutron reactors.
Meanwhile, the CNNC has pushed toward the third stage by negotiating
with France’s nuclear fuel-cycle company Orano (formerly Areva) over the purchase of a large
commercial reprocessing plant, and has proposed starting construction of large commercial fast-neutron
reactors in 2028.
China’s Civilian Reprocessing Programs
In July 1986, the State Council approved the construction of a pilot civilian reprocessing plant
with a design capacity of 50 metric tons of heavy metal per year at the Jiuquan nuclear complex, known
as Plant 404, as a key project of the national high-technology research and development “863 Program”
initiated in March 1986. Construction of the plant started in 1998 and finished in 2005. The construction
process encountered numerous difficulties, delays, and higher-than-expected costs. Finally, 24 years
after the project's approval, in December 2010, a hot test was conducted. However, due to technical
problems, the plant operated for the equivalent of only about 14 days during its first six years, from
December 21, 2010 to December 31, 2016, for an average capacity factor of about 0.4% (see table 1).
According to one conference report, the pilot plant began operating normally in 2017.
If so, it would
produce 500 kilograms of plutonium per year. However, others have argued that in the three years from
2017 to 2019 China finally completed the task of reprocessing 50 metric tons of spent fuel accumulated
